The Red Planet eBook

“Of course—­for Mrs. Boyce’s
sake alone I should have no alternative.”

She turned round and began to take up the thread of
the Nocturne from the point where she had left off;
but she only played half a page and quitted the piano
abruptly.

“The pretty little spell is broken, Majy.
No matter how we try to escape from the war, it is
always shrieking in upon us. We’re up against
naked facts all the time. If we can’t face
them we go under either physically or spiritually.
Anyhow—­” she smiled with just a little
touch of weariness,—­“we may as well
face them in comfort.”

She pushed my chair gently nearer to the fire and
sat down by my side. And there we remained in
intimate silence until Marigold announced the arrival
of her car.

CHAPTER XVIII

I shrink morbidly from visiting strange houses.
I shrink from the unknown discomforts and trivial
humiliations they may hold for me. I hate, for
instance, not to know what kind of a chair may be
provided for me to sit on. I hate to be carried
up many stairs even by my steel-crane of a Marigold.
Just try doing without your legs for a couple of days,
and you will see what I mean. Of course I despise
myself for such nervous apprehensions, and do not allow
them to influence my actions—­just as one,
under heavy fire, does not satisfy one’s simple
yearning to run away. I would have given a year’s
income to be able to refuse Boyce’s request with
a clear conscience; but I could not. I shrank
all the more because my visit in the autumn to Reggie
Dacre had shaken me more than I cared to confess.
It had been the only occasion for years when I had
entered a London building other than my club.
To the club, where I was as much at home as in my
own house, all those in town with whom I now and then
had to transact business were good enough to come.
This penetration of strange hospitals was an agitating
adventure. Apart, however, from the mere physical
nervousness against which, as I say, I fought, there
was another element in my feelings with regard to
Boyce’s summons. If I talk about the Iron
Hand of Fate you may think I am using a cliche of melodrama.
Perhaps I am. But it expresses what I mean.
Something unregenerate in me, some lingering atavistic
savage instinct towards freedom, rebelled against
this same Iron Hand of Fate that, first clapping me
on the shoulder long ago in Cape Town, was now dragging
me, against my will, into ever thickening entanglement
with the dark and crooked destiny of Leonard Boyce.

I tell you all this because I don’t want to
pose as a kind of apodal angel of mercy.

I was also deadly anxious as to the nature of the
communication Boyce would make to me, before his mother
should be informed of his arrival in London.
In spite of his frank confession, there was still
such a cloud of mystery over the man’s soul as
to render any revelation possible. Had his hurt
declared itself to be a mortal one? Had he summoned
me to unburden his conscience while yet there was
time? Was it going to be a repetition, with a
difference, of my last interview with Reggie Dacre?
I worried myself with unnecessary conjecture.